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Notes from a Working-Class Playwright

Contributor(s): Butler, Leo (Author)

ISBN: 9781350429468

Publisher: Methuen Drama

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Pub Date: November 27, 2025

Lexile Code: 0000

Features: Price on Product

Target Age Group: NA to NA

Physical Info: 0.56" H x 9.14" L x 6.15" W ( 0.85 lbs) 232 pages

Series: Theatre Makers

Descriptions, Reviews, etc.

Description: Award-winning British playwright, composer and screenwriter Leo Butler looks back over 25 of writing for the stage and his extensive experience teaching and mentoring emerging playwrights.

Brief description:

Leo Butler is an award-winning playwright. His plays have been produced by many of the UK's most important theatres, including National Theatre, Royal Court, Almeida, Birmingham Rep, and Royal Shakespeare Company.
He has written many celebrated plays about young people, including Made of Stone (Royal Court), Redundant (Royal Court), Boy (Almeida), and Decades (Brit School/Bridge Theatre Co.)

He has written historical plays such as I'll Be The Devil0 (RSC), and contemporary dramas such as Lucky Dog (Royal Court), Faces in the Crowd (Royal Court) and The Early Bird (Queen's Theatre, Belfast).

He has also adapted classics like Woyzeck (Birmingham Rep), pantomimes and comedies such as Cinderella (Theatre Royal Stratford East) and All You Need is LSD (Birmingham Rep), and musicals such as Alison! The Rock Opera (Royal Court/King's Head).

For ten years, Leo was Writers Tutor at the Royal Court Theatre and helped nurture a new generation of playwriting talent.

Review Quotes:

"Both a practical guide to playwriting and a memoir, Butler talks eloquently about childhood and place (he was raised in Sheffield) as an endless deep well for him to draw on as a playwright." --The Stage

"For me, [Leo] Butler is a poet of the human damage of poverty. His language is terse and fractured. He reminds me as much of Emily Dickinson as he does of many playwrights. He is, I think, as close as English theatre has come to the master of Bavarian naturalism Franz Xavier Kroetz." --Simon Stephens, playwright

"This book is much more than an autobiography ... Filling you with the feeling of creativity unleashed ... Notes from a Working-Class Playwright is a really fine book about playwriting that's both fascinating as a life story and compelling as a series of good ideas, all of which glitter in the mind long after you've put down the volume." --Aleks Sierz

"A really fine book about playwriting that's both fascinating as a life story and compelling as a series of good ideas, all of which glitter in the mind long after you've put down the volume." --Aleks Sierz Blog

"Butler offers humour and pragmatism throughout ... Aspiring playwrights will find Notes From a Working-Class Playwright a perceptive text." --Lou Reviews Blog

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